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After Facebook and Twitter, Google becomes the latest technology giant to have accidentally stored its users' passwords unprotected in plaintext on its servers—meaning any Google employee who has access to the servers could have read them. In a blog post published Tuesday, Google revealed that its G Suite platform mistakenly stored unhashed passwords of some of its enterprise users on internal servers in plaintext for 14 years because of a bug in the password recovery feature. G Suite, formerly known as Google Apps, is a collection of cloud computing, productivity, and collaboration tools that have been designed for corporate users with email hosting for their businesses. It's basically a business version of everything Google offers. The flaw, which has now been patched, resided in the password recovery mechanism for G Suite customers that allows enterprise administrators to upload or manually set passwords for any user of their domain without actually knowing their...

Facebook late last month revealed that the social media company mistakenly stored passwords for "hundreds of millions" of Facebook users in plaintext, including "tens of thousands" passwords of its Instagram users as well. Now it appears that the incident is far worse than first reported. Facebook today quietly updated its March press release, adding that the actual number of affected Instagram users were not in hundreds of thousands but millions. These plaintext passwords for millions of Instagram users, along with millions of Facebook users, were accessible to some of the Facebook engineers, who according to the company, did not abuse it. According to the updated post, Facebook discovered "additional logs of Instagram passwords" stored in a readable format, but added that its investigation revealed that the stored passwords were never "abused or improperly accessed" by any of its employees. Here's the full updated statement p...

IT leaders know the drill—regulators and cyber insurers demand regular network penetration testing to keep the bad guys out. But here's the thing: hackers don't wait around for compliance schedules. Most companies approach network penetration testing on a set schedule, with the most common frequency being twice a year (29%), followed by three to four times per year (23%) and once per year (20%), according to the Kaseya Cybersecurity Survey Report 2024 . Compliance-focused testing can catch vulnerabilities that exist at the exact time of testing, but it's not enough to stay ahead of attackers in a meaningful way. Why More Frequent Testing Makes Sense When companies test more often, they're not just checking a box for compliance—they're actually protecting their networks. The Kaseya survey also points out that the top drivers for network penetration testing are: Cybersecurity Control and Validation (34%) – ensuring the security controls work and vulnerabilities are minimized. Re...

Another Day, Another Data Breach! And this time, it's worse than any recent data breaches. Why? Because the data breach has exposed plaintext passwords, usernames, email addresses, and a large trove of other personal information of more than 6.6 Million ClixSense users. ClixSense, a website that claims to pay users for viewing advertisements and completing online surveys, is the latest victim to join the list of " Mega-Breaches " revealed in recent months, including LinkedIn , MySpace , VK.com , Tumblr , and Dropbox . Hackers are Selling Plaintext Passwords and Complete Website Source Code More than 2.2 Million people have already had their personal and sensitive data posted to PasteBin over the weekend. The hackers who dumped the data has put another 4.4 Million accounts up for sale. In addition to un-hashed passwords and email addresses, the dump database includes first and last names, dates of birth, sex, home addresses, IP addresses, payment histories,...

A Flaw has been discovered in the motherboards manufactured by the server manufacturer Supermicro, has left more than 30,000 servers vulnerable to hackers that could allow them to remotely compromise the management interface of unpatched servers. The vulnerability actually resides in the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) in the WPCM450 line of chips incorporated into the motherboards. Security Researcher at CARInet Security Incident Response Team, discovered that Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) of Supermicro motherboards contain a binary file that stores remote login passwords in clear text and the file is available for download simply by connecting to the specific port, 49152. Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) is the central part of the microcontroller that resides on server motherboard or in the chassis of a blade server or telecom platform. The BMC links to a main processor and other onboard elements via a simple serial bus. Baseboard management contr...